Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy — more than 10,000 times the energy used by modern humans — blast the Earth’s surface. Around 2.4 billion years ago, life took an evolutionary leap when bacteria learned to harness these photons to break apart water molecules and stitch carbon atoms into sugars. Along the way, they flooded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen and rewrote the rules of life. Source Every second, trillions of watts of solar energy — more than 10,000 times the ...

I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast . It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can't do. First, let's review the key characteristics. Anthropic claim that Claude Fable 5 offers the sam...

As part of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) program that aims to provide logistics to distributed units in a contested environment, Shield AI, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, L3Harris Technologies, and Parry Labs completed their fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 helicopter. For the first time, the H145 flew with systems from all four companies fully integrated on the aircraft. During testing, Hivemind mission autonomy successfully detected landing zone obst...

The fifth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 5, I chat with Mike , the author of Shellsharks . We talk about, among other things, balancing personal and professional identities on personal websites, curating interesting content on the web, and creating bridges between disciplines with curation. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Mike Shellsharks The fifth episode of Wond...

OK, back to how people think… See the first post in this series for context. Why Do You Want What You Want? On Easter Sunday 1929, a group of women walked down Fifth Avenue in New York City smoking cigarettes. They had been hired by Edward Bernays, a publicist working for the American Tobacco Company, to light up in public and treat their cigarettes as what Bernays called “torches of freedom.” Women smoking in public was a social taboo; framing the act as feminist defiance was desi...

Click to skip the introduction and go straight to the results. The first part of the story is that, as I already wrote here and here , I am using self-hosted Umami as the analytics engine for this blog. I am using it because I am curious to know how many people visit my blog, and I like numbers and graphs. Of course in this day and age, saying "humans" is a stretch, because you can never be sure if a visit is a human, or a bot. Umami does filter out a lot of the automated traffic because ...

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I put this blog on standard.site . Every post now also lives as a record on ATProto (the protocol behind Bluesky), and new ones publish themselves whenever I push to main . What it is # standard.site is a set of shared ATProto lexicons . The two that matter here are site.standard.publication and site.standard.document . The publication record describes the blog: name, URL, icon. Each post becomes a document record that lives in my own data repository on a PDS and points ba...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster.  In the last post Broker-Visible vs Client-Local Parallelism we looked at two ways of scaling Kafka consumption. The final unit of parallelism can be visible to the broker, as consumers, or it can be local to the client, as threads, virtual threads, async tasks, or some other execution mechanism hidden behind a smaller number of consumers.  Broker-visible parallelism is simple to reason about: if each consumer processes records seria...

The keyword in politics these days is ‘sovereign’. What few will admit is that it is effectively the adoption of the American strategy: Make America Great Again. In other words, reindustrialization of key sectors of the economy. The UK used to be a computing champion. Our chip designs (ARM) originated from the UK. Canada had BlackBerry, everyone was using Canadian phones. Like Canada, many countries have progressively slid into financialization. Huge banks and bank-related businesses, su...

The IKEA KARLBY worktop has quietly become the backbone of countless home offices. It’s cheap, solid, and pairs with almost anything. Below are five setups that real people built and use every day. Each one solves a different problem, whether that’s tight space, a tall user, or a budget that won’t stretch to a custom desk. 1. The KARLBY and ALEX IKEA Desk Setup Pairing a KARLBY worktop with two ALEX drawer units is the most copied IKEA desk setup, and for good reason...

Tigris is S3-compatible, which means you can point the AWS SDK at it and most things just work. The catch is that the Tigris-exclusive features—bucket forking, snapshots, object renaming, and the like—need verbose workarounds because the AWS SDK doesn't know they exist. So we wrote a Go SDK that does. It comes in two flavors: the storage package is a drop-in replacement for the standard S3 client with first-class methods for the Tigris-specific operations, and simplestorage is ...

LangChain recently posted about a database they built. I liked the post quite a bit, I thought it was pretty well written and did a really good job of explaining their architecture. It highlighted for me some of the interesting database challenges and workloads that are consequences of AI. This is an "observability database," which sits sort of outside the traditional OLTP/OLAP dichotomy, but leans a bit on the OLAP side. It exists to collect data from a bunch of different sources (in LangCh...

The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are with managers. Engineers don’t have a lot in common with legal, or design, or sales, but they also don’t need to interact much with those roles. In my experience, engineers are communicating with product managers...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan. Image: ISRO India’s Chandrayaan program is one of the few in the world dedicated to the exploration of our Moon. Starting with its discovery of lunar water that catalyzed the global Moon rush of today, the program has gotten media and creator attention worldwide. However, the coverage has often lacked the program’s specific scientific, technological, and geopolitical outcomes being laid out and contextualized agai...

(In 2008 I wrote a survey of some of the known sum-product theorems, see  here . Avi Wigderson has a great slide-set on sum-product theorems and their applications---the slides are on Avi's webpage of talks he has given (all the talks are excellent) which is  here . I had a prior post on sum-product theorems  here )  If \(A\) is a set then let \(A+A = \{ x+y \ \colon\  x,y\in A \} \),     \(A\cdot A = \{ xy \ \colon \  x,y\in A \} \). Let \(A= \{1,\ldots,n\} \). \(|A+A| = \Theta(n...

We had our first tropical storm of the trip today, as evidenced by my soaked clothes and shoes! We’d taken a short trip to the Vinhome Mega Mall in District 9, and the rain came completely out of nowhere. Well, from the sky specifically. We came to the Vinhomes Grand Park area in the eastern periphery of Ho Chi Minh City to see family of my in-laws yesterday, and it became our base for a couple of days. Vinhomes is a massive residential property developer in Vietnam, and the Grand Park pre...

After five weeks in New Zealand, it was time for a change of scenery. Following my original plan and given the proximity, Australia was the obvious choice. However, I had to shorten my stay to reach Japan in time for the cherry blossoms. I decided to split the next two weeks between Melbourne and Sydney. I was also looking forward to finally slowing down and staying more than 1–2 nights in the same place (or so I thought 😅). Just a few days before my arrival, Melbourne was named the "...

Yep, I definitely won't buy a bigger #3DPrinter. 🫣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Yep, I definitely won't buy a bigger #3DPrinter. 🫣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and s...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-45447 for the project OpenSSL , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a heap use-after-free in PKCS7_verify(). This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone ca...

A week in which some things happen and some things do not happen, much like other weeks.  Current situation: Not pictured: The 3 different kinds of beef jerky we just got at Buc-ee’s. The pain of having children who become driving teenagers is the exorbitant cost of auto insurance. The joy is getting to stare out the window as the midwestern landscape moves by and think about nothing and everything for hours at a time.  Monday 01 June: Dentist in ...

A few weeks ago, I was at my brother’s place, watching NBA, and amongst other things, I was teasing him about the fact that he’s putting up weight. Which is just a fact. But he’s also in his 40s, so that’s understandable. He pointed out that I’m also gaining weight (but I’m not in my 40s), and since it was a long time since I weighed myself, I decided to hop on a scale, and the number that came out was 89.6kg. Now, I’m 190cm tall, so being almost 90kgs isn’t really a tragedy but ...

Last week I wrote about the problem with using the accept attribute for uploading files. As a quick reminder: When you use the accept to specify which file types will be allowed like this: …the dialog will disable invalid types like this: This is bad because: The disabled files are greyed out making them hard to read Some users won’t notice the subtle greyed out styling - so will try clicking the invalid files anyway And this will make the interface feel unrespo...